Elisabeth Gerber says the
Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority (AAATA) is "really darn good"–yet many of her neighbors would "never" ride the bus.
"I think that both smart management and great community engagement have allowed [AAATA] to put together a system that really works," says Gerber, whose research as the Jack L. Walker, Jr. professor of public policy at the University of Michigan includes a focus on transportation policy. "I sound like a booster, and I don't mean to be, but it's true."
However, she says, many in our community still choose to accept the financial and environmental costs associated with getting around town by car.
"They have vehicles and it's convenient for them to drive and they do that," says Gerber, who also serves on the board of the
Regional Transit Authority of Southeast Michigan. "But how do you reach those people, both to get their support and perhaps to educate them about some of the other benefits of public transit?"
Gerber says understanding and responding to the needs of those riders of choice will be AAATA's "main challenge" going forward. It'll also be a recurring theme in the four-part, bi-weekly
Concentrate series on mass transit that this article kicks off.
Riders of choice
Chris White, AAATA's manager of service development, says about one-third of the trips taken on AAATA buses are by riders who own a car and choose not to drive.
"Typically when you make improvements that serve choice riders, that'll serve people who depend on transit as well," he says.
So the question becomes: What's keeping more new riders of choice off the bus, and what can the AAATA do to better to serve them as well as those who use the service out of necessity?
In raising these issues with local transit experts and advocates, three topics come up repeatedly: service hours, area of service coverage and rider-facing technology. White says demand for extended hours of service is one change that the AAATA has already clearly noted.
"The trend that we've seen in the last several years is many, many more of the people that use our service are working in jobs that don't work traditional hours," he says. "They're working evenings. They're working weekends."
White notes that many routes started running later on weekday nights and weekend evenings after the
AAATA's millage proposal passed with a whopping 70 percent of the vote last year. Other routes added weekend service for the first time, and more improvements are coming this year. However, while weekday service on the major 2 and 4 routes now stretches to 12:30 a.m., weekend service doesn't run past 8:00 p.m.
"I think [AAATA does] a very good job of understanding demand, but it's more work-related demand," Gerber says. "What about people who want to go downtown for dinner on a Friday night or Saturday night? Those would be choice riders. I don't think that's been a focus."
Martha Valadez is a transit organizer for the
Ecology Center and
Partners For Transit, which campaigned for the AAATA millage last year.
"We have extended significantly, obviously, with the millage that came last year," she says. "But still what we're hearing is that there's not enough service in the evenings and on the weekends that caters to the nightlife in Ann Arbor and in Ypsilanti. That's from folks who live in Ann Arbor but also folks who live in the neighboring communities."
Where is as important as when
Evening and weekend service aside, Valadez says many residents she's talked to in those neighboring communities would be happy to have any transit service at all. During the millage campaign she frequently heard from residents of Scio Township, Pittsfield Township and Saline.
"Because people are so connected to the Ann Arbor and Ypsi communities, they were hearing about the new service coming into these areas and they were like, 'How can we connect where we live, where we reside, to be part of this transit system?'" she says.
In other cases residents who are already connected to the transit system are looking for it to be more efficient. AAATA board member and Ypsilanti-based transit activist Gillian Ream Gainsley notes that service to eastern Ypsi and the Willow Run area currently consists of two big loops–routes 10 and 20–that take 45 minutes to circumnavigate. Changes to those routes next year will make them more direct, but Gainsley expects that route 46–another loop, this one in southern Ypsi–will also require service changes as it gets more established.
Gainsley expresses amazement at some riders' "ingenuity" in hopping from one route to the other to shorten their travel time.
"It's great to see people using the transit system, but I think it's our responsibility to make that more convenient for them," she says.
Real time information
Another major convenience that's currently lacking is the availability of online real-time bus information.
"Most people who would be choice riders are used to using their smartphones to learn all sorts of things," Valadez says.
However, only text updates are available in real time through AAATA's website and a map feature is currently unavailable. The authority recently made some bus tracking data publicly available for potential use by
app developers.
"We had some real challenges with the website that was rolled out a few years ago, and we're not shy about saying that's a work in progress," says Nancy Shore, program director for
getDowntown, which provides a variety of transit resources for downtown Ann Arbor workers. "Some of that is just tied to the way our real-time data is managed."
That will also change significantly in the coming months, as AAATA is in the process of slowly installing a new CAD/AVL (computer aided dispatch/automatic vehicle location) system, replacing a system installed in 1999. The main advantage of the new system will be the availability of an improved API for app developers in the community to work with. Although some transit systems, like New York's
Metropolitan Transportation Authority, have developed proprietary apps, it's more common for systems to offer their data up for the public to create their own apps. AAATA community relations manager Mary Stasiak says there are no plans to create an official AAATA app.
"Apps are a dime a dozen in transit," she says. "None of them are what everybody wants. Everybody wants something a little different, and so what we have decided to do is create what we can create based off of the CAD/AVL system that we purchase and stream our data out for others to use in creating apps."
After last year's big millage victory, AAATA stands at something of a crossroads, with a broad range of potential improvements within the authority's financial reach.
"Transit funding had really been at a standard rate since the 1970s, and all of a sudden we got the funding to do the things people had been asking us to do," Gainsley says.
Shore says community input is consistently important to the AAATA, and that "stakeholders of all sorts" are valued. She says the authority is as interested as anyone else in getting more people both literally and figuratively on board with mass transit.
"Just by the fact that we use the term ‘alternative transportation' we continue to show that it's not the norm and mainstream," Shore says. "We want to get to the point where that's not true."
Patrick Dunn is an Ann Arbor-based freelance writer and a senior writer at Concentrate and Metromode.
All photos by Doug Coombe .
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